Singapore Writers Festival

Had quite a activity-packed weekend in Singapore this time:
- More chili crab Friday night. That makes it three crab dinner in two weeks!
- Shopping at Sim Lim Sqaure
- Pigged out at the Ritz-Carlton Sunday Champange Brunch - three hours of posh food! (Moet et Chandon + the biggest chesse spread I've ever seen in my life + lobster + oysters + crab claws + foie gras = choresterol shock!)


And last but not least, I went to three events at the Singapore Writers Festival - too tired to write about them now but I have to say that all of them were really thought-provoking for entirely different reasons.

Rewind a bit and tell you a bit more about the fest. Maybe this quote from the website does a good job of conveying the spirit of it all -

"The Singapore Writers Festival celebrates the power of the written word!"

The formula for doing this is not so hard it seems - grab some thought-provoking authors and let them roam around giving readings, signing autographs, put them into panels and other weird situations. Give the wannabe writers workshops on how to write genre bestsellers, biographies, blogs, graphic novels, etc.

Also host them in a great venue like Singapore's new National Library.

And I guess for readers like me it's a chance to connect back to the writers and their thoughts - reading (like writing) is essentially such a solitary activity that one can feel so isolated from the rest of the world. No wonder people say 'You got to read this book!' so much... they just want some company in the reading journey.

I attend three sessions so far (write more about them in later posts):

1. A reading by up-and-coming Thai-American writer, Rattawut Lapcharoensap. He writes in English and just publish his first collection of short stories, "Sightseeing".

2. A talk by cyberpunk author Bruce Sterling.

3. Another talk on Australian food with chef Kylie Kwong and food writer (among other things) R.W. Apple.

Who is Chang Noi? [Part 1]

If you are a regular reader of the Nation's opinion pages, you may have noticed an regular columnist who goes by the psuedonym 'Chang Noi'.

I'm a big fan of his - to my mind, he's probably the best columnist writing in English about Thailand. Big names from the Nation stable like Sutthichai Yoon, Thepachai Yong or Pana Janviroj do regularly contribute hard-hitting editorials, but I say that none of them do so with the style and panache of Chang Noi.

A big contrast is that Chang Noi actually has a sense of humour. It can be at times playful and irreverent. See this piece he devoted to "The 'un-Thai' nipple crisis" (our version of Janet Jackson's Nipplegate last Superbowl):

The fashion show was meant to be spectacular, and the dress designed to be daring. That one of Methinee Luk-Ket’s breasts slipped out was, well, simple physics. The photographers did their job: they snapped it. The sensationalist press did its job: it sensationalised it. Now the Ministry of Culture wants to send police to fashion shows and tighten up legislation to prevent repetition of such “un-Thai” behaviour.

Or occasionally he lets lose with the big satire. See "The thoughts of Chairman Maew" and its sequals - "The thoughts of Chairman Maew, II" and "Chairman Maew's thoughts for 2005".

Even more, I love it when he gets 'serious' goes for some deep analysis. While the Nation editors I can imagine are knee-deep in the nitty-gritty their newspaper operations, with news stories coming in left and right, Chang Noi takes a step back and give you some perspective that certainly gives you new way of looking at things.

I like this article on Tak Bai, "Explaining Thailand to the world". To illustrate the nuances of how others outside Thailand perceive Tak Bai, Chang Noi sets up the piece with this:

Around New Year, Chang Noi watched one of the video CDs of the Tak Bai incident. The showing took place outside Thailand, with an audience of teachers and students mostly from Asian countries ranging from India to Japan...

At the end of the one-hour showing, there was first a stunned silence, and then a lively discussion. Thai and non-Thai, Muslim and non-Muslim, all had something to say.

The reactions he recounts to us are very understandable and all together though-provoking. At on point in the video showing, some non-Thais in audience was at a lost on what the military officers were intructing the prisoners to do:

What was going on? Thai members of the audience had to explain. The instructor was organizing them to sing a kindergarten song about elephants. “Elephant, elephant, elephant; have you even seen an elephant?” There was another stunned silence. An East Asian member of the audience then began to think aloud. So first we saw the security forces treating people like animals, then treating those who were lucky enough to survive like infants. Do the Thai security forces think that people in their country’s far south are infants and animals? If so, does that explain why the situation has become so bad?

So that was good, ha? You can try some more selected articles here:

• "Southern conflict marked by a profound sense of history"
• "Beating a beauty for entertainment"
• "The culture of PM Thaksin"

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All this leads to back to the title of this post - now that you know who Chang Noi is, who really is Chang Noi? I've wondered for the longest time who's the person behind the psuedonym.

To be continued...

P' Pei Writes an Editorial

I think this will be publish in the Nation this Saturday.

JUST A THOUGHT: Thailand sorely lacks a reading culture

What has happened to our education system? Or are parents to blame for not paying enough attention to their children? Are the media and the Internet to blame for distracting children from reading books?

You go girl!

Birthday Letters

I've hurt someone dear to me. Deeply hurt.

The more I think about it, the excuses I tried to use to deflect blame become thinner and thinner.

Away from the noise and heat of our argument, I suddenly realized I had no ground to stand on. And that sorry may not be enough.

Not this time.

I think of what Ted Hughes felt when he learn about Sylvia Plath's suicide.

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Birthday Letters is the title of British Poet Laureate Ted Hughes's last collection of poems. With these poems, he perhaps ended his long public silence about his wife, the poet and feminist icon Sylvia Plath and her suicide in 1963.

One can forever analyse the complexity of their relationship and marriage, but few can deny the sequence of events (although one may question the cause and effect).

Hughes walked on Plath and their two children for another woman. Soon after she commited suicide by putting her head in a gas oven.


I had bought this book a while back, swept up with tragic mythology and controversy that built up around the couple and around Plath in particular. As A.O. Scott puts it:

Many of Plath's admirers treat her as a martyr and Hughes as, symbolically if not actually, her murderer. Her short life has become, fairly or not, a parable of the stifling of women's self-expression by a chauvinist literary establishment in the years before feminism. Those more sympathetic to Hughes have preferred to see him as a fellow sufferer, a flawed, talented man married to a gifted woman with a history of mental disturbance, who had first tried to kill herself long before she met him.

At first, I only got around to only digesting the first of the 88 poems, "Fulbright Scholars". Hughes speaks to Plath, as in most of the collection, in the second person - telling her how he may have seen her for the first time in the news clipping about that year's batch of Fulbrighters:

Where was it, in the Strand? A display
Of news items, in photographs.
For some reason, I noticed it.
Picture of that year's intake
Of Fulbright Scholars. Just arriving -
Or arrived. Or some of them.
Were you among them? I studied it,
Not too minutely, wondering
Which of them I might meet.
... (continues)

These days I read deeper, losing myself in the sad magnificant verses.

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I think of Ted Hughes picking up the pieces of his life after learning of the tragedy. How he went on, being villified as someone to drove to suicide the woman he once, and probably still, loved. Shouts of 'murderer' at every poetry reading.

But Hughes maintained his studied silence and lived on. He collected and edited Plath's poetry, earning her a posthumous Pulitzer Prize with Ariel. He also edited her journal, which she had kept up until the weeks leading to her death.

Suddenly I read all this -
Your actual words, as they floated
Out through your throat and tongue and onto your page -
Just as when your daugther, years ago now,
Drifting in, gazing up into my face,
Mystified,
Where I worked alone
In the silent house, asked, suddenly:
'Daddy, where's Mummy?'

So in the poet, I find a fellow sufferer.

Kitchen Diary 2 - Solid

17 May - Lasagne with Zucchini and Ricotta filling

From Bill Granger's recipe.











18 May - Risotto Primavera

Good vegetarian dish with zucchini, french beans, mushrooms, etc.

10 May - Salmon Teriyaki

Got lovely results from the recipe in Harumi Kurihara's cookbook.

5 July - Veal Cutlet with Anchovy Butter

This literally took me 5 minutes to make. Just sear the seasoned fillet, finish in oven then top with butter. Toss salad and you're done.

Kitchen Diary 1 - Liquid

Porridge with shredded chicken. Breakfast for my bf's mother when she came to visit.














Soup of Things Leftover in the Fridge. Just so happens I had bacon, eggs and some old veggie left that day.












Minestrone. Italian veggie soup (made from scratch, mind you).

I made so much I ended up eating it for 3 days straight.

I'm Listening

I did an experiment the other day - come home from work and barred myself from turning on the TV. Just spend the rest of the evening listening to music.

There still quite a few CDs I had bought and listened to maybe once, but never really 'digested'. As with books, I'm a bit of a shopaholic when it comes to CDs. Somehow I want to own a physical CD rather than downloading it off the internet - old fashioned, ain't it?

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On the CD shelf:

1. From the Apres-Midi Selecao shop in Tokyo

We found this little shop is the basement of Parco Shibuya in Tokyo and loved it. You enter the shop and you feel like you're at a beachside bungalow of the cool friend with a kick-ass chill out music collection. (Imagine some soothing music playing in your head...)

They've got a great bossa nova section and the first CD that caught my eye was Joao Gilberto's self-titled album. He's a great songwriter, arranger and guitarist from Brazil among other things - but I would say the thing I love most about him is just his voice. In the spare arrangement on this album (in most songs it's just him on guitar and vocals with the drummer), his soft quietly melodic -- almost melancholy -- voice is the definite highlight.

I was almost out of the door of Parco when I knew I had to run back and get another CD. I'm a sucker for duets and could not resist this album - Domingo by Gal Costa and Caetano Veloso.

Caetano Veloso is another Brazillian great; you may remember him from Pedro Almodovar's Talk to Her where he sings this achingly beautiful song (download it here) at the dinner party just in the middle of the movie.

[It's also him again singing at the opening of Wong Kar Wai's Happy Together with a grander orchestration and the image of a thundering Iguazu Falls. ]

This is another lovely work by him I couldn't resist. Gal Costa I hadn't heard of before but I love her dark and rich voice as well.

I just read somewhere that it was Caetano's first album - wow!

Last but not least, the shop also gave us a free compilation - something called '2005 Third Arrival ~ Rainy Night Edition'. I think it's sort of a sample of the series compilations done by this DJ called Toru Hashimoto and I would say every song is great in its own unique way.

2. Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young + Tom Waits + vintage Rolling Stones

I'm getting to like some of the classic blues/folk influenced rock and the guys above are now on the playlist. Nothing like a blues guitar riff or the liquid twang of a pedal steel guitar. If you want a change from the plain vanilla voices you get on American Idol, try:

• Neil Young, CSN&Y: high pitched, "bordering on whiny" - but perfectly conveying a quiet melancholy mood. You have to listen to him on the song 'Helpless'.
• Tom Waits: His voice is "whiskey-harden gravel" - so darn macho. Favorite song: Jersey Girl
• Mick Jagger, The Rolling Stones: To those Rockstar INXS people - see here how rock and roll is done!

Deja Vu by Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young












Heartattack and Vine by Tom Waits

Let It Bleed by the Rolling Stones

Michiko Kakutani

I had a strange urge today to google Michiko Kakutani. For the uninitiated, she's the New York Times's influential and 'much-feared lead book reviewer' - according to this Salon.com article.

And she's also turned into a pop culture icon. I remember first hearing her name in an episode of Sex and the City - she was the one reviewing Carrie's book. Michiko just has one of those names that get stuck in your head... there's a certain fun rhytm and rhyme in hearing it. Mi-chi-ko Ka-ku-ta-ni...

Thus began my mild obsession with this woman (cue music from Psycho shower scene). I still have to find a list of her notorious (but entertaining) negative reviews. A fairly recent one is this review of the lastest Tom Wolfe in which she end with the following put-down:

You may never put down a Tom Wolfe novel. But you never reread one, either.

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Let see... what I found on the Google trawl:

1. The biggest catch has to be this hilarious piece from McSweeney's online. Here's a quick quote:

We'd use it [her name], I'm embarrassed to say, as a metaphor for onanism.
"What'd you do last night?"
"Had a big date with Michiko Kakutani."

2. She's reported to be 'famously reclusive', but the Pulitzer Prize website does provide a short bio and picture.


"Ms. Kakutani is single and lives in Manhattan." How Sex and the City! Her hair reminds me of early Carrie in season 1.







3. More than one commentator has weighed in on her use of the word 'limn'.

4. I'm not the only one obsessed with 'DEAR SWEET MISS MICHIKO K.' - see here.

5. And I also had a reunion with one of my favorite humour sites 'Suck.com'. Too bad it's now defunked. They quoted Michiko here.

The Review of Books I'm Too Lazy to Finish

I have to admit I'm a bit of a shopaholic when it comes to printed material. Books, magazines or newspapers - seems I can't resist buying and accumulating (not to mention committing serial murders of trees) more than I can hope consume at the rate I'm going.

It's funny how even you can be materialistic towards books. Essentially they should be just a medium or vessel that transport the message to the reader; the real physical object, the pages, cover and binding, should not really matter - it's the content that counts.

But I guess publishing is a business not too much different from any other in our captitalist economy. The whole point is to entice people to want own your book (or shampoo or jeans or lipstick). Colors ads, posh packaging, premier shelf placement are need if you want to shift your product in any industry.

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Gosh, I didn't mean to sound so cynical! I still love, love to read - although a combination of my unstable attention span and the oversupply of books has caused me left me with a whole bunch of books I'd started but not finished.

To give you and idea, here an incomplete list:

1. A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius by Dave Eggers
2. Mad Dogs and Co. by Chart Korbjitti
3. Forbidden Colors by Yukio Mishima
4. Elizabeth Costello by J.M. Coetzee
5. Breakfast at Tiffany's by Truman Capote
6. Great Expectations by Charles Dickens
7. Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking by Malcolm Gladwell
8. The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami
9. The Wings of The Dove by Henry James

(... as you can see I kinda over reach with all the Oprah Book of the Month Club-like selections)

As to why I still haven't finished, I place the blame completely with my lazy self. These books are all wonderfully written with engaging plots - shame to me for not sticking with it.

So as something of an atonement (FYI, Atonement by Ian McEwan is the best book I've read this year) I kick off an occasional series of posts entitled 'The Review of Books I'm Too Lazy to Finish'.

Oh and I will try to finish the darn books.

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Next post - a review of:

A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius by Dave Eggers.